This is a serious problem, but there are a few small benefits in this. A lot of previously inaccessible things will be popping up -- animals that have been frozen for a long time will be accessible. It's like nature (or I guess millions of motorists) is doing the heavy lifting for us.
Again, from all the science it seems like global warming will be a catastrophe, but it would be nice to find a few more bog people.
IANA Physicist, and I'm terrible at math. But I think I have this figured out.
In order to learn something, you have to make a measurement. Of course, in the quantum world, measuring a system will change it, so you are giving up what you know by measuring. It seems that in negative information situations, you are giving up your certainty in order to measure something, but your aren't learning anything in return. So your net 'gain' of information is negative.
Oh, I get it too. I thought you were making fun of me for using the noun form "U.S." and then using the adjective form "Canadian", but you were actually making the joke that Canada is like the 51st state! Har, har!
The problem is that electronics are shitting out terds with 90 day limited warranties made with the cheapest components possible, and then they expect you to pay top dollar for it. Sorry, I'm not interested in re-buying everything I own every year.
I have refused to buy a digital camera so far because they are crap. I tell everyone I meet that digital cameras are $300 disposable cameras.
"If I understand you, the weak ID claim would be that, just as the inukshuk appears to have been made by intelligent humans, rather than some as-yet unknown non-intelligent process, life appears to have been made by an intelligent designer, rather than some as-yet unknown non-intelligent process."
Sorry to stop you so quickly -- you put a lot of time into a well-reasoned and non-inflammatory post, but what I claim is that weak ID *necessarily* makes no claims about life or evolution. It just claims that we can find evidence of intelligent planning in any system. (Although it could be cused to make such claims.) Here's a good example. Say, for instance, that scientists examining the background radiation from the big bang looked at it and said, "You know, this is starting to look like a radio broadcast rather than just random radiation". It's a claim that some kind of intelligence (presunmably human on planet Earth) planned out this pile of rocks or this boradcast signal. It's the same idea behind SETI -- we should have some way of knowing whether what we are looking at was planned out or not. Weak ID could be used to support evidence of alien civilization in the case of SETI, or some kind of intelligent creator in the case of the big bang.
Weak ID claims there can be objective criteria to determine intelligence, which we can apply to any set of observations. We humans seem to have it hardwired in our brain when it comes to finding inukshuks or other human-created things, and we argue about it tremendously when it comes to projects like SETI.
What occures to me is that if one doesn't accept weak ID, which is simply the claim that we can detect intelligent planning, one should also conclude we have no way of telling whether or not people are intelligent. It's the same process when I decide a house didn't grow out of the ground, or when I decide a signal came from an alien Rush Limbaugh. If there is really no way to know whether or not intelligent design (human or otherwise) went into the creation of anything I come across, I have no way of knowing if myself or anybody else is intelligent.
Somewhere I read that a common definition of planet is 'an offspring of the sun' -- a body in orbit of the sun that was formed in the original spinning disk of matter that formed the sun, or was formed from matter ejected from the sun, etc. Something that was not captured after the sun became a star.
Of course, if there was a collision of an outside body with a planet, that might create a messy explosion that was a mix of outside and solar system material. So maybe your definition is better.
First off, understand that there is a difference between omniscient or omnipotent and intelligent.
There isn't anything that an omnipotent designer couldn't do, but there is plenty that you and I, as intelligent designers, can't do.
I'll explain my second point with a walk through a little though experiment. Say you are walking on a supposedly deserted island and you come across on of these. No one is supposed to be around, but surely these rocks could not have fallen this way, right? Well, maybe they did. Then you come upon another, and another. Wait a minute. These things *have* to have been built by people. The map *has* to be wrong. There is something about these structures that scream out, "someone built me!"
So now, let's say we come across the proverbial monoloth on another planet. Something that just can't have happened by natural forces. It just had to be some kind of intelligent creature from somewhere in the past.
OK, now, let's imagine that there is something in the structure of *the entire universe* that looks just like someone planned it out. We're not saying anything else right now, just that it looks like something with intelligence, something with a mind like yours and mine, planned this out or thought this through.
This is what I call the 'weak ID' argument. Weak ID doesn't make any other claims about the designer, just that the phenomena that we are observing shows evidence that it was planned out by an intelligence. It is, in fact, falsifiable. In order to make a falsiable claim with a weak ID theory, you have to define a criteria by which you can distinguish natural systems from those designed by an intelligence. Then you can test any system described by your criteria as to whether is was designed or planned.
I'm not saying that we have any criteria or an experiment yet, but it's within the realm of falsifiability.
Of course, there are strong ID theories which say something like "This can't be anything else, so therefore there must be an omnipotent, omniscient creator." I could go along with that, but how to get from there to revelation and holy scripture, I'll never know...;)
Philosophy was originally "Love of Wisdom". This is why some old philosophers could claim that reality was a dream, or that knowledge was nonsense, and still be considered philosophers -- they were considered wise.
It sounds like what your saying is that modern philosophy is different from what the Greeks were doing -- sort of like how alchemy is different from chemistry, but alchemy was the direct ancestor of chemistry.
". The foundation of philosophy is logic, and true, provable argument..."
No, it isn't. "In Ancient Greek philosophy, these five broad types of questions were respectively called analytical or logical, epistemological, ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic." So even in the Western tradition, the Greeks thought that logic was only one of the five topics in philosophy. 'Philosophy' literally means 'love of wisdom'. It is not logic.
You really haven't taken a philosophy class, have you? One that hasn't dealt with anything other than logic?
When coming back to Windows after a long session in a Unix environment, what do you miss the most?
Personally, I miss the tab autocompletion in most shells. The tab autocompletion in the Win XP shell seems primitive by comparison:
it will encapsulate directory names with quotes, resulting in me arrowing back into the quoted path to autocomplete the path further
it seems to choose the first match if there are multiple matches -- whereas Unix shells show the list of options, and some even complete only up to the common characters!
I'm a self-taught PHP hacker. I've fooled around with VB for MS Access and I hate it -- way too crufty with ADO and DAO, but I digress...
Anyway, this is the strategy I've come up with after having to go over my old code.
Every 'flow control' statement (if, while, else, etc) gets a comment in plain English about what conditions it's checking for.
Every logical block of code gets a 'mission statement' saying what large-scale, abstract task about what they are supposed to accomplish. When I say 'logical block', I'm not talking about something the computer will understand, but an abstract grouping of lines of code meant to accomplish a high-level task.
For some obscure functions or arguments, they will get a comment at the end, just to help myself with parts of PHP that I'm not familiar with. This is just to keep me from looking up things, and other PHP hackers may not need this commentary to understand the code and its function.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much metacommentary there will be about these issues...
No, but things tend to get freeze dried pretty quickly once they're frozen. And leather lasts a long time.
"Yes, I have a grant to find bogmen in Siberia, but I can't make it because of the catastrophic flooding..."
No, second prize was steak knives. Third prize was you're fired.
Again, from all the science it seems like global warming will be a catastrophe, but it would be nice to find a few more bog people.
And yes, I have a degree in anthropology.
In order to learn something, you have to make a measurement. Of course, in the quantum world, measuring a system will change it, so you are giving up what you know by measuring. It seems that in negative information situations, you are giving up your certainty in order to measure something, but your aren't learning anything in return. So your net 'gain' of information is negative.
I think this was more a matter of delivery. It took some explanation for me to get the joke, which usually ruins it ;)
Oh, I get it too. I thought you were making fun of me for using the noun form "U.S." and then using the adjective form "Canadian", but you were actually making the joke that Canada is like the 51st state! Har, har!
Canadian. The US/Canadian border.
So we will probably see several consumer relases of Windows OS based on Longhorn, but never a distro itself called 'Longhorn'?
Well, I fear that the new-fangled World Wide Web and internet cafes are bringing and end to the era of TTY bars. Dam you WindowsXP!
So the US/Canadian border is worthless?
Lawpoop is my slashdot ID, it's not like my real name or anything.
I have refused to buy a digital camera so far because they are crap. I tell everyone I meet that digital cameras are $300 disposable cameras.
I think 'Chris' is the author's name.
Sorry to stop you so quickly -- you put a lot of time into a well-reasoned and non-inflammatory post, but what I claim is that weak ID *necessarily* makes no claims about life or evolution. It just claims that we can find evidence of intelligent planning in any system. (Although it could be cused to make such claims.) Here's a good example. Say, for instance, that scientists examining the background radiation from the big bang looked at it and said, "You know, this is starting to look like a radio broadcast rather than just random radiation". It's a claim that some kind of intelligence (presunmably human on planet Earth) planned out this pile of rocks or this boradcast signal. It's the same idea behind SETI -- we should have some way of knowing whether what we are looking at was planned out or not. Weak ID could be used to support evidence of alien civilization in the case of SETI, or some kind of intelligent creator in the case of the big bang.
Weak ID claims there can be objective criteria to determine intelligence, which we can apply to any set of observations. We humans seem to have it hardwired in our brain when it comes to finding inukshuks or other human-created things, and we argue about it tremendously when it comes to projects like SETI.
What occures to me is that if one doesn't accept weak ID, which is simply the claim that we can detect intelligent planning, one should also conclude we have no way of telling whether or not people are intelligent. It's the same process when I decide a house didn't grow out of the ground, or when I decide a signal came from an alien Rush Limbaugh. If there is really no way to know whether or not intelligent design (human or otherwise) went into the creation of anything I come across, I have no way of knowing if myself or anybody else is intelligent.
Of course, if there was a collision of an outside body with a planet, that might create a messy explosion that was a mix of outside and solar system material. So maybe your definition is better.
First off, understand that there is a difference between omniscient or omnipotent and intelligent.
There isn't anything that an omnipotent designer couldn't do, but there is plenty that you and I, as intelligent designers, can't do.
I'll explain my second point with a walk through a little though experiment. Say you are walking on a supposedly deserted island and you come across on of these. No one is supposed to be around, but surely these rocks could not have fallen this way, right? Well, maybe they did. Then you come upon another, and another. Wait a minute. These things *have* to have been built by people. The map *has* to be wrong. There is something about these structures that scream out, "someone built me!"
So now, let's say we come across the proverbial monoloth on another planet. Something that just can't have happened by natural forces. It just had to be some kind of intelligent creature from somewhere in the past.
OK, now, let's imagine that there is something in the structure of *the entire universe* that looks just like someone planned it out. We're not saying anything else right now, just that it looks like something with intelligence, something with a mind like yours and mine, planned this out or thought this through.
This is what I call the 'weak ID' argument. Weak ID doesn't make any other claims about the designer, just that the phenomena that we are observing shows evidence that it was planned out by an intelligence. It is, in fact, falsifiable. In order to make a falsiable claim with a weak ID theory, you have to define a criteria by which you can distinguish natural systems from those designed by an intelligence. Then you can test any system described by your criteria as to whether is was designed or planned.
I'm not saying that we have any criteria or an experiment yet, but it's within the realm of falsifiability.
Of course, there are strong ID theories which say something like "This can't be anything else, so therefore there must be an omnipotent, omniscient creator." I could go along with that, but how to get from there to revelation and holy scripture, I'll never know ... ;)
Philosophy was originally "Love of Wisdom". This is why some old philosophers could claim that reality was a dream, or that knowledge was nonsense, and still be considered philosophers -- they were considered wise.
It sounds like what your saying is that modern philosophy is different from what the Greeks were doing -- sort of like how alchemy is different from chemistry, but alchemy was the direct ancestor of chemistry.
No, it isn't. "In Ancient Greek philosophy, these five broad types of questions were respectively called analytical or logical, epistemological, ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic." So even in the Western tradition, the Greeks thought that logic was only one of the five topics in philosophy. 'Philosophy' literally means 'love of wisdom'. It is not logic.
You really haven't taken a philosophy class, have you? One that hasn't dealt with anything other than logic?
Try this site. Open bidding for software projects.
Personally, I miss the tab autocompletion in most shells. The tab autocompletion in the Win XP shell seems primitive by comparison:
So your code consists entirely of functions and subroutines? Do you write libraries exclusively?
Anyway, this is the strategy I've come up with after having to go over my old code.